Here We Lie

I said, That’s my backpack, but I don’t know what that stuff is.

I said, Someone must have put that there.

I said, I need to make a phone call.

A lawyer met me at the police station, demanding that I be released immediately. Marcus, it turned out, had a previous misdemeanor; he was cuffed and led away, and he passed me without making eye contact.

I never knew what my parents did, what strings they pulled or how they’d known to pull them in the first place. That night, I was cited for a misdemeanor and released, and my name never made it into the papers. At home, Dad paced while Mom did the talking, her voice losing its customary coolness. Did I understand the damage I had caused? Did I know what something like this might do to Dad’s career, to his reputation, to our family? Was I aware of his stance on drugs, the hypocrisy of his daughter being involved with a drug dealer, being found with an amount that constituted a felony? And just what did I have to say for myself?

I asked what would happen to Marcus, whether he would have to spend the night in jail.

“Wake up!” Mom hissed. “What do you think will happen to him?”

A few weeks later Mom wrote a check, I pled to a lesser charge and my record was sealed. My only punishment was the type of community service that would eventually work its way onto my résumé.

More pot had been found at Marcus’s loft, a place I’d tried to imagine over the six weeks we’d been together, when I’d fantasized about the two of us in an actual bed, on an actual mattress, with actual sheets. For bringing drugs into a place whose official mission was to serve children, Marcus was charged with a felony. That fall, I served a Mabrey-imposed house arrest, only leaving my bedroom on Tuesdays and Thursdays when Mom brought me to a local senior center to serve out my sentence.

One day that October, she slapped the Hartford Register in front of me, open to an article about an inmate that had been killed in a brawl. He was identified as Marcus Rodriguez, twenty, of Hartford, awaiting trial for felony drug sales. The article didn’t mention that he’d been a student at Capitol Community College, that he’d coordinated the new mural at the Hartford Arts Cooperative, that he’d had a kind smile, that he liked to talk after sex, that his girlfriend had sold him out.

In November, Dad won the senate race by a landslide.

* * *

I spent most of that fall on my childhood bed in Holmes House, shifting from hysterical to catatonic like they were the only settings that had been programmed into me. Marcus was dead, and I was going to come out unscathed. Marcus was dead, and his death was directly related to me, set in motion by the kiss I’d given him that night at the slop sink, my hands soapy with water, as if a line could be drawn between the two, a simple dot to dot.

Mom had spread the word that I was suffering from a bad case of mono, and from time to time get-well cards arrived from my classmates at Reardon. I completed my coursework that semester through independent study, moving zombie-like through worksheets and take-home tests.

Once Mom found me on my bed, sobbing into a pillow. “What now?” she asked, as if I’d done some new horrible thing.

I wiped away my tears, but my voice came out weak and blubbery. “He was so young.”

Mom leaned close, and for a moment I thought she might do something to comfort me, like pat me on the shoulder or tell me it would be okay. Instead, she slapped me across the face. “You will snap out of this,” she ordered. “You’ll get on with your life and we will never speak of this again, do you understand?”

She was true to her word; if Kat or MK knew anything about what I’d done, they never mentioned it me. Dad had already leased an apartment in Washington; after the election, that became his permanent residence, his stays at Holmes House brief and rare. Up until then, Dad had been a buffer between Mom and me, a mild-mannered negotiator. Now that he was gone, the silence stretched between us, too large to be breeched with a phone call.

Once I wandered downstairs while Mom was hosting a meeting for the local branch of the League of Women Voters, pausing in the hallway as the women chatted and sipped tea from china that had been in the Holmes family for a hundred years. Hildy, our live-in domestic help, passed me with the tea service rattling faintly on a silver tray.

“How is poor Lauren?” one of the women asked, and I started, hearing my name.

Mom didn’t miss a beat. “We were so worried about her, but she’s been growing stronger every day. This virus just hit her hard, poor thing.”

I leaned against the wall, listening to the women’s sympathetic murmurs as Mom reinvented my troubles—fevers and listlessness, loss of appetite, how devastated I’d been not to participate in more of the campaigning. “Lauren’s a strong girl, though,” Mom said. “She’ll be back to her old self in no time.”

It was an amazing performance, award-worthy. Somehow, Mom had managed to erase the drugs in my backpack, the hours I’d spent in the police station, Marcus bleeding to death in the Hartford Correctional Center, the months I’d spent crying into my pillow. She’d reinvented me as a brave warrior, a dutiful daughter.

She was so convincing, I almost believed it myself.

OCTOBER 10, 2016

Megan

The alarm on my cell phone went off at 6:25, then again at 6:30 and, as a last call, at 6:35. Marimba—the world’s most hateful sound. Bobby’s side of the bed was empty, and when I entered the kitchen five minutes later, he was already draining his first cup of coffee and filling his thermos with the thirty-two ounces that would get him through the day.

I stood in the doorway, yawning.

“Well, if it isn’t the woman of my dreams,” Bobby said, grinning at my disheveled state. I was wearing one of his old UMass shirts, the decaying hem hanging to my knees.

I pulled a face. “Save any for me?”

Bobby gestured to a steaming cup on the end of the kitchen peninsula. The coffee was the exact murky shade of brown I liked, tempered with a bit of cream. He was dressed in everything but his shoes and his pants, which were draped over a bar stool, and I gave him a thumbs-up at the effect: a blue-and-white striped shirt, a tie with the tiny floating heads of the Beatles, plaid boxers, tan dress socks. Bobby was one of the cool teachers. Every high school had one—the teacher who donned the giant tiger mascot for pep rallies, who somehow managed to make class so interesting that his students forgot all about their smartphones for fifty minutes. If he had to, he would stand on his desk to get their attention, à la Dead Poets Society or challenge a student to a lunchtime dance-off as a form of motivational bribery. Once, I accused him of having literally no shame, and he seemed surprised by the idea. Why in the world should he have shame?

I took a few fast sips, willing the caffeine to head directly to my brain. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

He screwed the lid on his thermos, tightening it and holding it upside down, just to make sure, before setting it next to his briefcase. “Still slogging through the American Revolution.”

“At least you’re finally done with those Puritans,” I commented.

“Those prudes.” He grinned, giving me a slap on my decidedly round ass. I looked more and more like my mother each year, despite eating salads for lunch and pounding out the miles on a treadmill at Planet Fitness.

The movement sent my coffee sloshing, and I cupped my hands around the rim to stop it from spilling. “It’s far too early to be so frisky.”

“No such thing as too early.” Bobby was stepping into his pants, creased sharp from ironing the night before. “What’s your day like?”

I grimaced. “Meetings from eight-thirty to noon, drop-ins after that.”

“Do we have any plans for tonight? Because if we don’t—” he tucked and zipped and reached for his belt “—a few of my buddies are playing at this bar in Ballardville.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

Bobby worked his feet into his shoes, bending to tie the laces. “They aren’t very good, or at least they weren’t the last time I heard them.”

I smiled. “I’ll adjust my expectations accordingly.” Bobby was the exact opposite of me—he made friends easily and collected them everywhere he went: work, fast-pitch softball, hockey games. Two minutes after leaving a party, Bobby’s phone would ping with the notification of a friend request from someone he’d just met. Me—I kept things cooler, played my hand close to my chest. For the most part, other than those times I snooped from Bobby’s account, I avoided social media altogether, and my work friends were just that—friends at work.

I met Bobby’s goodbye kiss head-on, cringing at my own blend of sleep and coffee breath. Bobby didn’t seem to mind.

He grabbed his thermos and laptop bag, patted around for his wallet and keys. “Maybe we can leave around seven?”

“Sounds good.”

I emptied the rest of the coffee from the pot, swirled it with cream and sugar and reached for the remote. These were my private moments each morning—coffee, the Boston Globe and whatever dishy gossip was happening on the Today show. At work, I would be slammed—first our weekly departmental meeting, with its twenty-bullet-point agenda, then the dozens of students I would see, some in two-minute bursts while I helped them find the right form or directed them to the right staff member, and others for long, tear-streaked discussions that began with a question about registering for fall classes and ended with a general unburdening about the difficulties of balancing work and school, the impossibilities of child care, the unreliableness of their transportation.

I flipped from NBC to MSNBC to CNN, dodging commercials. Like the rest of America, I was on election overload, but it was an itch I couldn’t resist scratching. What had happened overnight? Who had said what on Twitter? Bobby and I rarely talked politics—not because we weren’t interested in elections or invested in their outcome, but because there were sticking points, touchy subjects that led us from reason to argument in about sixty seconds flat. “I thought people from the Midwest were supposed to be conservative,” Bobby would tease.

“That’s a stereotype,” I would remind him, and besides, it was a long time since I’d been in the Midwest.

I heard news of a suicide bombing at a market in Pakistan, then the financial report. The Dow was up, and that was a good thing. Thirty-five years old and I still had only a basic grasp of the stock market, although for the first time in my life, I actually had money there, in the form of a direct transfer from my monthly paycheck. I stretched and stood, making my way back to the sink. Behind me the news had switched back to the national scene, to politics. That’s when I heard the name Mabrey and wheeled around. It was as if I could face him head-on, as if he were in the room with me, that slow grin on his face. My head went fuzzy with the white noise of memory—rushing and pulsing, things that were long buried threatening to rise to the surface.

The caption on the screen read Senatorial Sex Scandal.

I didn’t even know that I’d dropped the mug until I heard it shatter, the last inch of lukewarm coffee splattering on the tile and a small shard of ceramic nicking me in the shin.

And just like that, it all came back.

FRESHMAN YEAR 1999–2000

Megan

From the window seat on the bus, America was a blur of fields and forests, the brick fronts of small-town buildings, the jutting skylines of cities. Every bit of it was unfamiliar and terrifying. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe Woodstock, Kansas, was my destiny, and I was only fighting it by heading all the way to the East Coast with my worldly possessions crammed into two army-green duffel bags and my old JanSport backpack. Maybe Woodstock was what I deserved after everything I’d done.

Enough. I tried to sleep, but besides the occasional jolting was the fear that I might close my eyes and wake up in Canada or Texas, or all alone. Each time the bus stopped, I hooked my backpack over my shoulder and lined up for the exit, then rushed to the bathroom and back, afraid to be left behind. Once a man about my dad’s age tried to chat with me, but outside the bounds of Woodstock and the diner, I seemed to have forgotten how to have a polite conversation. Did I look like a typical college student or an overgrown runaway?

“I’m not going to kill you, you know,” he huffed, and when I slid back into my seat, my cheeks were flaming.

We were delayed fifty miles outside of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with an overheating engine, and it took a few hours for a replacement bus and luggage transfer, then for new tickets to be issued. It didn’t occur to me until we were on the road again that I would be arriving at the bus station in Scofield much later than originally planned. Keale’s shuttle system ran on the half hour, but it stopped each night at nine. Using my wristwatch and the illuminated road signs, I calculated the distance and realized I was officially screwed. The bus wouldn’t be arriving until ten at the earliest. In the beam from the overhead light, I consulted the map supplied by a travel agent at AAA and learned that the Scofield station was five miles from campus—an impossible distance to walk with my bulging duffel bags.

Three hours later, I pressed my forehead to the glass when I saw signs for Scofield. You live here now, I told myself—something that seemed both impossible and incredibly surreal, as if I were trying to convince myself that I’d grown a third foot. Two miles south of town, the bus rumbled past a good-sized lake, the surface shimmering with boats and Jet Skis docked for the night. Everything felt sleepy, winding down from too much summer. I squinted out the window at the license plates on the Audis and Peugeots, trying to determine if they belonged to locals or vacationers.

Either way, I thought, wealth lives here. Privilege. People different from me.

The main drag was settling down for the night—lights off at most of the stores. Everything had a cutesy name—To Dye For and Slice of Heaven and Scoops & Swirls, which had a giant ice cream cone protruding from its striped awning. A few families were still clustered around sidewalk tables, wearing flip-flops and suntans, catching the drips on their ice cream cones.

There were four passengers left aboard the bus, and only two of us—myself and a man with a pronounced limp—stood to disembark at the Scofield station. The porter handed down our luggage, and the other man left immediately with his pull-along bag, dragging his bad leg behind him, aiming for the lone car in the parking lot.

I stood with the duffel bags that contained everything I owned in the world, my gaze following the porter’s gesture to the pay phone at the end of the platform.

“Maybe you can call a taxi, if you don’t have someone meeting you,” he said, although his voice was hesitant, rising in a question. We hadn’t passed any taxis in town.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, not wanting to concede helplessness already. As the bus pulled away, I hauled my bags one at a time up to the platform, plopping them beneath the closed ticket window. Fishing a few quarters from my wallet, I set out to investigate the payphone. If there was no taxi service in Scofield, I’d try the college. And if no one answered there, what would I do? I could call Mom back in Kansas, where she and Gerry Tallant were probably sitting down to dinner, thrilled that I was out of the picture and that they had the place to themselves. It was a horrible idea, one that belonged to my life as a teenager, not an independent college student. How could my mom help from fifteen hundred miles away?

Twenty yards out, I saw that the payphone was broken, its coiled metal cord dangling without a receiver.

Well, shit.

The night had quickly descended into late-summer darkness, the air humid and thick with insects that dive-bombed my face. I circled the station, weighing my options. In Woodstock, I would have hailed a passing car, because I was likely to know the person who stopped—someone whose kids I’d gone to school with, someone who had worked with Dad or managed a booth at the fair with Mom.

The phrase You’re not in Kansas anymore burned in my brain. Hah, a bad joke.

An older-model Honda passed on the road, tailpipe rattling. I wondered if the driver had seen me, or if I should have tried to flag down the car. Too late now.

Suddenly, the urge to pee, which I’d been battling since we crossed into Connecticut, became insistent. With the bus station closed, my only option appeared to be a secluded space behind a commercial-sized trash container. I heard the Honda’s clunky tailpipe again while I was zipping up and cursed myself. Someone could be rooting through my bags right now, making off with my clothes and books and my beloved afghan with the red, white and blue Chevron stripes, not to mention my wallet and driver’s license and the painting I’d taken off the refrigerator, the oversize stick figures of Dad and Mom and me. I zipped and broke into a run.

A man in jeans and a black T-shirt was leaning against the Honda, smoking a cigarette and not looking in my direction, as if he’d been there forever and his being there was in no way connected with me. I stopped next to the platform, catching my breath. It startled me when he spoke, as if he might be addressing a third, unseen person.

“You know, any one of the local creeps could have come by and made off with your stuff.”

“Are you one of the local creeps?” I asked.

He dropped his cigarette, grinding it beneath the toe of a scuffed Doc Marten. “I am the local creep.”

I laughed despite myself.

“Actually, the city of Scofield has hired me to enforce its public urination laws, which is a common problem with our—” he hesitated, looking at me pointedly “—vagrant population.”

Conscious of my unwashed hands, I jammed them into the pockets of my jeans. “Guilty,” I confessed, blushing bright red.

He grinned. “So. Not from around here?”

I shook my head. “Kansas.”

“That’s what I thought. Well, not Kansas, specifically, but I knew you were from somewhere in the Midwest.”

“I have that Midwest look about me, do I?”

He gave me an appreciative up-and-down glance, taking in the greasy blond hair I’d pulled into a ponytail, the teeth I hadn’t brushed since that morning, somewhere in Ohio. I was wearing a baggy T-shirt—I always wore baggy T-shirts—but I felt his gaze linger for a moment on my chest. “Yep. Corn-fed goodness,” he said.

I looked past him, out toward the road, trying to figure out what came next.

He cleared his throat. “Isn’t there anything you want to ask me?”

“Like what? Your name?”

He dipped at the waist in a mock bow. “Joseph P. Natolo, at your service. Actually—I thought you might need a ride.”

“Well, yeah. I’m a—”

“A student at Keale,” he finished. “That’s not exactly rocket science. Come on, let me load you up.” He grabbed one of my duffel bags, mock wincing at its weight. “What did you do, pack your library?”

I hesitated, watching him cram the bag into his trunk, already cluttered with loose shoes and clothes and fast food bags spotty with grease. “Do you work at the college?”

He took the other bag from my grasp, his hand brushing mine. “Would you believe I teach cultural anthropology?”

“No,” I said.

He laughed. “Good for you, Midwest. Being gullible is never a good thing. No, I’m just Scofield’s one-man welcoming committee.”

The trunk was so full, he had to lean his weight against it before we heard the telltale click. He looked at me. “Well? Come on.”

* * *

Joe’s car smelled faintly of pot, although an evergreen air freshener dangled from the rearview mirror. I belted myself in, heart hammering beneath my rib cage to warn me this was not my brightest idea. Outside my window, the scenery was a dark blur of open meadows divided by wooded areas, dense with trees. I rested my fingers on the door handle, planning an emergency exit—stop, drop and roll.

Joe glanced at my hand. “Seriously, I’m not a psycho. I was driving by and I spotted you there, and I figured you needed some help.”

I gave him a weak smile. “Thanks.”

He pointed at a rectangular green sign that appeared in front of us and receded in the side mirror: Keale College, 3 Miles. “See? We’re heading in the right direction.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled as he laughed. “Could have fooled me. So let me ask you this. What’s so horrible about men, anyway?”

I half turned in my seat. “When did I say men were horrible?”

Joe rolled his eyes. “Please. You come all the way from Timbuktu or wherever just to go to a school where there are no men, except the odd janitor or history professor. What’s that all about?”

“It’s not about hating men,” I said, my mind searching for one of the phrases from Keale’s brochures. “It’s about empowering women.”

Joe shook his head. “Why would anyone want to deprive themselves of this?” He raised a hand from the steering wheel and made a circle in the air, meant to encompass the two of us.

I snuck a sideways glance, trying to determine Joe’s age. At least as old as me, maybe a few years older. Still, there was a confidence to him—the way he’d tossed my bags into his trunk without getting my explicit permission, his easy, flirtatious jokes. He seemed decades more sophisticated than the boys (men, really, although they didn’t seem to have earned the title) I’d known in Woodstock. I cleared my throat. “So, do you go to school around here, too?”

He shrugged. “It’s been a few years now.”

It wasn’t clear if he was referring to high school or college. “Here in Scofield?” I pressed.

“Sure. You’re looking at a proud graduate of Scofield-Winton High School, class of 1995. Well, I was proud to graduate. I’m not sure the powers that be at SWHS are thrilled to claim me. But beyond that—no. I’m not what you’d call scholar material.”

He didn’t seem embarrassed to tell me this, but I was embarrassed that I’d asked. Without taking a single college class, I was already a snob. Joe’s car slowed, and I spotted twin brick walls, formed like parentheses around either side of a wide entryway. Giant steel letters spelling Keale College rose out of a manicured lawn. “The school was established in 1880,” Joe boomed suddenly, adopting the inflections of a tour guide. “If you look straight ahead, you’ll see the place that has been home for more than a hundred years to privileged girls from Connecticut, the larger New England area and, apparently—” this was said pointedly to me, with a raised eyebrow “—regions beyond.”

“Ha ha,” I said.

We passed acres of gently rolling lawn before coming to the buildings themselves—towering brick structures bathed in golden lights. Footpaths crisscrossed the campus, cutting around and between buildings. Joe stopped to let a girl pass with her rolling suitcase and then cleared his throat, preparing to launch into the next stage of our tour. “Keale was founded by prominent members of the Episcopalian Church, presumably as a way to keep young ladies away from the horrors of intermingling with the opposite sex. I hear that the school isn’t particularly religious today, although they have maintained a fine tradition of refusing young eligible bachelors entry into the sacred dormitories of said young women.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Joe said, dropping the tour-guide impression. “And believe me, I’ve tried. Men aren’t allowed to step foot in the dorms unless they’re family. So up here we have the Commons—that’s the dining hall. Classroom buildings, the science center, fine arts auditorium, a gym complete with indoor track and racquetball courts...”

I followed his gestures, trying to take it all in. Keale looked like its own small town, separate and distinct from Scofield, operating on its own purpose and pace. I knew from the brochures that there were just under two thousand students at Keale, but only a few were visible that night, including a girl lying on a blanket, looking up at the stars, and a trio running past in gym shorts and tennis shoes, ponytails swinging, their steps perfectly synchronized.